


web of lies

by captainangua



Series: DeanCas oneshots [12]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canon Compliant, Denial of Feelings, Episode: s14e13 Lebanon, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Gen, Getting Together, Happy Ending, Knitting, M/M, Mutual Pining, cas makes a friend, post episode, sorta - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-22
Updated: 2019-02-22
Packaged: 2019-11-02 01:46:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17878751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainangua/pseuds/captainangua
Summary: Cas visits one of Dean's friends from town on a few false pretences. Dean reaps the benefits.





	web of lies

Cas waited for exactly half a minute before knocking a second time. The buzzer was obviously broken but Cas had hoped his “client’s” hearing was good enough that she would notice the knocking.

Someone was definitely in. Distantly, he could hear the television on, two walls behind this one. He recognised the programme. It was a soap opera, and one of Dean’s favourites.

He sighed with some relief when a few moments later he heard a footsteps approaching the door – padding in a way which suggested their owner was wearing slippers. Cas gave a small smile, and remembered that it was still early for a Saturday.

“Hello, Dear,” she said, once she’d finished slowly opening her door. “I’ve seen you about, haven’t I?”

There was a peculiar quavering her voice which was oddly particular to older people, and it was strangely frustrating for Cas to listen to. It seemed to demand patience, and it was particularly frustrating considering that he was aeons older than they would ever be. There was also a question hanging on the end of her speech, and after registering that Cas realised that he hadn’t yet explained why he was there.

“Hello, Mrs Graves. I’m here on behalf of uh… Mr Campbell. Dean. You spoke yesterday.”

She blinked and summoned a bright, almost girlish smile to her face. “Oh, _Dean_. Of course. The young man who was going to help me with my website.”

Cas was almost certain that no one could rightfully refer to Dean as a ‘young man’ any longer, but he nodded along obligingly.

“Yes, that’s correct Dean is uh…” _Still in bed_. “Very busy, but he was determined to make sure that you got the help you needed.” _He’d panicked when he’d got home the night before, after offering the nice lady who ran the bakery a website for her fledgling business, because he’d told her too many times about the website making business he and Sam ran together and he hadn’t known what else to say._ “So, he sent me along. I’m… I’m his partner.” _Or, rather the person who’d watched Dean leave for his bedroom still bemoaning the consequences of his flagrant lies and, as someone who didn’t sleep and wanted Dean to have one less thing to stress over in his life, had sat up all night learning about web design._

Thinking he finally had the basics down, Cas had duly delivered himself to Mrs Graves’s door.

Sam might have given him a lot of pep talks about not needing to always feel useful, but Cas was beginning to think, as he grew more understanding of who he was, that it was something critical to _how_ he understood himself. So, he wasn’t trying too hard to suppress it, now that he accepted it as an impulse that belonged to him.

“ _Partners_ ,” she said, seeming to draw the word out for an unnecessary length of time. She also had her eyebrows raised.

“…Yes.”

There was a strange silence which fell between them for a moment, and then the woman smiled. “Well you had better come in then, it’s still freezing out here. Thank you so much for coming over.”

As Cas allowed himself to be led into the small bungalow he glanced at the photographs lining the walls, framed in an identical gilded and now faded sets. She had a large family, but lived alone, and she had not dusted in some time. Cas suspected that this fact would bother her. She had cats too, but neither of them were home right now.

Cas followed his host into the kitchen and wondered when this sort of life, which Mrs Graves did not seem to be unhappy with, had started to seem lonely to him. He had once spent two hundred year doing nothing but monitor, watch the progress of a small town, with no one to keep him company, no one there with whom to exchange even a word. In comparison, his time sharing a frequently overcrowded underground bunker with a hoard of well-meaning but loud hunters hadn’t been much more than the blink in the eye of his long existence – and yet so quickly become the normal with which to judge the way others lived.

“Now,” she said when she’d sat him down with her laptop and the black coffee he’d been urged into requesting.

“It’s not a big business I have here. It’s mostly only been something I do for locals here, on small commissions, you know. Or for family. My youngest firstborn’s christening. My uh, my cousin’s ex-wife got herself remarried. I made her a quilt then too.”

“Very generous of you. I know how time consuming those can be.”

“And of course I finished one last week for my granddaughter. She recently got married to her, uh, _partner_.” There was that odd implication behind that word again.

“Tell me, you and Mr Campbell. Have you considered, uh… marriage?”

Cas put his coffee down, narrowly stopping himself from choking on it. “Uh… no. That’s not uh… that’s not something either of us have… have ever spoken about.”

She nodded, seeming to feel herself on firmer ground now. “I understand. It can be difficult to know how to broach the topic. How long the two of you been together?”

Cas smiled to himself. If the question was turned on him, Dean would probably stammer, maybe even blush. But Dean also frequently told Cas that he should lie more if he wanted to get along with people easier.

“A long time now,” he answered, feeling almost honest.

“You know. _I_ asked my husband.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. Almost scandalous at the time,” she said, with some pride. “He didn’t quite know what to say.” She paused for a minute and stared at the screen. “Would you both wear suits? Or is that _insensitive_ to ask?”

Cas gave a half laugh, taken off guard for a moment. “I don’t know.”

She narrowed her eyes, a glimmer of humour nestled there now. “For which question?”

“Both. Neither of us, I think, would look good in that much white.”

She grinned wide, and Cas wondered whether he could do much to help with her tooth decay if he could get a hand on her. “I like you,” she said. “You can come around anytime you like.” She paused. “You know,” she said, as though about to admit to some great secret, “I bake too.”

“Does that mean you’d like me to help you with more than one website?”

“It means you should come over another day and eat one of my scones with me.”

“I… I should be able to manage that. Thank you.”

*

It was a very routine trip into town on a beer run when Dean next spotted Mrs Graves. He was there with Sam, who didn’t find it funny when Dean demanded that he use his body as a shield.

“You _cannot_ avoid her forever.”

“Watch me!”

“Dude, let go of my shirt already,” Sam hissed, causing Dean to finally, very reluctantly, let go.

“Is that the Campbell boys I hear?”

Sam froze, and from his position, still hidden behind his brother’s frame, Dean noticed his arm raise in that awkward little wave he did. God, what a dork.

“Hey, Mrs Graves.” She did have a first name, but Dean could not currently remember it, and had a feeling that she didn’t prefer it. She was a formidable old creature in her own way, and this way she had a title. “About that website, we really would have been over sooner -”

“I can’t thank you enough for it – it’s working wonders”

“- it’s just that Sam here runs us ragged on such a tight schedule – what?”

“Your Partner,” she said carefully. “He just made everything look so professional – you boys must be so successful.”

“We, we try, Ma’am,” Sam managed, turning to Dean with a look of deep confusion.

“But – oh, I _have_ got something here to thank you with, even though he just would not take any payment from me. It’s been so long since I’ve seen you in here I haven’t even had a chance to give it to you yet…”

“We’ve just been so busy. Being professional,” Dean said as he leered closer to her counter where she was struggling with a large bag beneath it. He didn’t like the tone of reproach or the mystery to the situation, but he was only human, he liked free stuff.

“Here you go,” she said, pushing the bag towards him. He saw a flash of bright woolly colour peaking out behind the plastic. “It seemed appropriate. I always make these for weddings, and I would hate to be a person who _pushed_ … but you should know that he loves you - _so much_. It near hurt to look at him.” She smiled down at the counter. “Made me almost remember being young again.”

And the look on her face turned Dean so speechless, so thoughtless, that he almost forgot that his brother was still standing behind him. “Thank you,” he said, as he dug his fingers tightly into the plastic.

Mercifully, Sam stayed quiet on the drive home, apparently also deciding not to be a person who pushed, but Dean knew his brother, and he knew his brain would be racing in the same direction as Dean’s was.

Towards Cas.

Because when Dean had made his stupid claim that this was something he’d be able to do, he’d told two people about it: Sam and Cas.

And much as Dean didn’t doubt Sam probably could make a website if he tried, neither he nor Mrs Graves would have kept quiet about the fact.

So Cas.

Cas who apparently loved him.

 _So much_.

Dean thrummed his finger’s over the steering wheel and wanted to open the bag full of bright woollens he’d thrown into the back seat. He felt like a fucking five year old on a Christmas he’d never had.

But he also absolutely did not want to look in the bag.

And he didn’t want to ask Cas about his web designing.

But.

“Aren’t you going to take the…”

“Leave it, Sam.”

A few hours of avoiding Cas later, Dean came back to the car and retrieved it, but only after he was alone in his room did he open it.

It was a rainbow. She’d knitted a pride flag – as some kind of throw, for a bed.

A bed she seemed to think that Dean slept in with Cas. Cas who must have gone down to help this woman, and competently, just because he knew that Dean would feel bad he wasn’t able to, and somehow Mrs Graves had got the impression… the _mistaken_ impression that something was going on between them.

Well. More than just _something going on._

It was probably just another one of Cas’s dumb-ass interactions with humans. A misunderstanding. Something to laugh off and forget about. Nothing.

But the heavy wool he was still holding in his hands didn’t feel like nothing.

Dean remembered trying to patch up holes in socks, in jeans and t-shirts growing up. Sam had grown so fast when he’d finally started, and Dean had never been able to keep a wardrobe intact with so much hunting. He couldn’t even imagine the hours creating something like this would take, even if you were a semi-professional.

Carefully, Dean laid it down on his bed, still folded. And then he sat beside it and picked up his phone.

**_So I think I just got a wedding present_ ** _**for not building a website.**_

His phone buzzed back at him almost immediately. **_Mrs Graves?_**

 ** _Ambushed me in the shop._** Dean bit down on his lip. **_You should see this thing._**

A few moments later and Cas was knocking on his door. Like Dean had been hoping he’d do, except apparently not because he could swear his heart was beating faster than if he was actually being ambushed as he opened up.

Cas’s gaze immediately slid to the bed and Dean tried not to dwell on where that made his thoughts turn. “It looks good,” he said simply.

“ _It looks good_ ,” Dean repeated. “Why did she think we were getting married?”

Cas shrugged. “She assumed. It seemed impolite to disagree with her. But she doesn’t think we’re getting married. She thinks we’ve been together a long time, but that we’re both still too afraid to make any further commitment.”

The way Cas was meeting his eye… That was absolutely a _challenge_.

Dean stepped forward. “So you still lied to her.”

“Did I?”

The son of a bitch was smiling now.

“Cas?”

“Yes?”

Dean rolled his eyes before fixing them on the ground. Something might be happening now but that didn’t mean he was brave enough to look at it yet.

“Get in here and close the door already.”

*


End file.
